Informal Housing, Inadequate Property Rights: Understanding the Needs of India's Informal Housing Dwellers

In India, as in many other developing countries, urban population growth and the shortage of planned affordable housing have led to 26–37 million households (33–47 percent of the urban population) living in informal housing (slums and unauthorised housing). Slum dwellers often live in poor conditions and face the threat of eviction or demolition. Unauthorised housing dwellers usually have some basic services (such as electricity and water). However, they may lack proper roads, sewage, or drainage, and they also face the potential threat of demolition.The Indian government has tried many different approaches to help improve living conditions for informal housing dwellers, but without sizeable impact. Redeveloping and relocating slums has not scaled, improving service provision has been slow, and "legalising" unauthorised housing has been limited. Unfortunately, informal housing is going to exist for the foreseeable future in India, and there is an urgent need to improve the lives of people who are living in such sub-optimal conditions.This report applies a property rights lens to segment the different types of informal housing, to understand the size and the needs of these segments, and to identify potential solutions to meet these needs. The research focuses specifically on owner-occupants, since they are most likely to invest in improving their housing as they will benefit from these improvements—both as residents and as owners of the asset.Research for the report involved reviewing 40 reports, speaking to 56 experts, conducting around 200 qualitative interviews of informal housing dwellers in 90 settlements, conducting quantitative interviews of 517 informal housing dwellers in 40 settlements in four cities (Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, and Cuttack), gathering feedback on the findings in a workshop with 10 experts, and feedback on a draft report from 21 experts

Experimental Performance of Solar Collector cum Regenerator for Coupling with a Liquid Desiccant Cooling System

A solar liquid desiccant air cooling system cools air in two stages: dehumidification followed by sensible cooling. It uses concentrated liquid desiccant to dehumidify the process air and reject the absorbed moisture to the ambient air through solar thermal heating in a solar collector cum regenerator (C/R). For the dehumidifier the liquid desiccant must be cold and strong in desiccant to reduce tendency of evaporation of water in the solution so that it can absorb water vapor from the process air. But, in the solar regenerator the solution must be hot to enhance evaporation of water from the solution to the regeneration air which requires thermal energy. The solar collector cum regenerator performance decides the overall cooling performance because for every kilogram of water dehumidified, at least the same amount must be rejected in the solar regenerator. Direct coupling of the solar regenerator with the dehumidifier may not be possible since the moisture removed in the dehumidifier may not get evaporated in the solar regenerator simultaneously. The solar thermal energy collection and the operating conditions decide the regeneration capacity of the solar collector cum regenerator. This paper presents experimental solar regeneration performance of CaCl2-H2O and LiCl-H2O solutions using two different sized solar C/R of absorber area 1.47 and 4 m2 inclined at 14o from the horizontal. The diurnal mass of water evaporated from LiCl and CaCl2 solutions at different concentrations is reported. The water evaporation per unit absorber area was found to be independent of C/R size for experiments carried out on the two regenerators for both LiCl and CaCl2 solutions for similar levels of irradiance and initial desiccant concentration. In addition, the paper discusses some basic solar C/R design issues and explores the coupling possibility of a solar C/R with a liquid desiccant cooling system. The results presented are useful in deciding the size of a solar C/R for coupling with a liquid desiccant cooling system of desired capacity

Deportation 101: A Community Resource on Anti-Deportation Education and Organizing

The Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and Families for Freedom (FFF) originally developed the Deportation 101 curriculum in 2005. In 2007, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and Detention Watch Network began collaborating with IDP and FFF to create an expanded curriculum and to present additional trainings.Together, the Deportation 101 team has partnered with community-based groups to train directly affected people, organizers, and service providers in various parts of the country, including Alabama, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia

Hysteresis Models for Steel Members Subjected to Cyclic Buckling or Cyclic End Moments and Buckling (User's Guide for Drain-2d:EL9 and EL10)

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154132/1/39015094008078.pd

Holographic confining/deconfining gauge theories and entanglement measures with a magnetic field

We study various holographic pure and mixed state entanglement measures in the confined/deconfined phases of a bottom-up AdS/QCD model in the presence of a background magnetic field. We analyse the entanglement entropy, entanglement wedge cross-section, mutual information, and entanglement negativity and investigate how a background magnetic field leaves its imprints on the entanglement structure of these measures. Due to the anisotropy introduced by the magnetic field, we find that the behaviour of these measures depends nontrivially on the relative orientation of the strip with respect to the field. In the confining phase, the entanglement entropy and negativity undergo a phase transition at the same critical strip length, the magnitude of which increases/decreases for parallel/perpendicular orientation of the magnetic field. The entanglement wedge cross-section similarly displays discontinuous behaviour each time a phase transition between different entangling surfaces occurs, while further exhibiting anisotropic features with a magnetic field. We further find that the magnetic field also introduces substantial changes in the entanglement measures of the deconfined phase, however, these changes remain qualitatively similar for all orientations of the magnetic field. We further study the inequality involving entanglement wedge and mutual information and find that the former always exceeds half of the latter everywhere in the parameter space of the confined/deconfined phases.Comment: 41 Pages, many figure

A study on body mass index and its correlation with type 2 diabetes

Obesity and increases in body weight are among the most important risk factors for type 2 diabetes mellitus. Obesity contributes to the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus. Body mass index is also known as obesity index. Body mass index is a strong and independent risk factor for being diagnosed in cases of type 2 diabetes mellitus. There is a high risk of type 2 diabetes in those who have a higher body mass index. The present study has been done with the objective of finding correlation between BMI and type 2 diabetes

Transient Performance of a Liquid Desiccant Solar Regenerator

A solar liquid desiccant cooling system uses renewable energy and natural refrigerant (water) which makes it attractive. Its main components are air dehumidifier, solar liquid desiccant regenerator and direct/indirect evaporative cooler. In this cooling system, strong liquid desiccant absorbs water from air in the dehumidifier that must be rejected in the solar regenerator. This makes regeneration of a liquid desiccant one of the key processes in the cooling system that requires thermal energy. The energy needed for regeneration can be obtained from sun with the help of an open type solar collector cum regenerator. It also enables storage of energy in the form of regenerated desiccant for use during non-sunshine hours. Detailed analysis of the performance of this device has prime importance in integrating it with a liquid desiccant air cooling system. This entails the development and experimental performance testing of a liquid desiccant solar regenerator under actual weather conditions over the sunshine hours. A solar collector cum regenerator of effective solar area of 4 m2 was fabricated using corrugated sheet metals, layers of thermocol insulation, insulation wood box, glass supporting frames and glasses. The solar collector cum regenerator was mounted on a metal supporting structure inclined at 14o. The corrugated absorber was coated with iron oxide, before black paint, to minimize corrosion. This paper presents transient regeneration performance of the solar collector cum regenerator in terms of increase in concentration, mass of water evaporated and solar collector cum regenerator efficiency. Desiccant concentration increase, total mass of water evaporated and mean daily solar collector cum regenerator efficiency during regeneration of LiCl and CaCl2 solutions were found to be 0.33-0.46 & 0.31-0.47; 13 & 17 kg and 36 & 43%, respectively. These typical results were obtained from experiments carried out on separate days between 9 am and 4 pm in the month of May. The mass of water evaporated was estimated using an equation derived by applying conservation of solution mass. The experimental procedure and the performance analysis technique used are useful in designing solar components of open cycle liquid desiccant cooling systems

CLUSTERING OF NETWORK DEVICES TO FORM A VIRTUAL NETWORK SERVICE CONTROL PLANE

Enterprise networks often consist of multiple sites that often operate in a hierarchical manner for routing traffic among the sites, as well as to/from external networks. With the deployment of enterprise or hybrid cloud services within enterprise networks, such as cloud productivity services, communication services, etc. many policies, security, and/or performance requirements have to be met that often depend on the knowledge of sources and destinations, including their user/group information, security information, credentials, etc. However, it is often difficult to aggregate such information to scale in an end-to-end manner, similar to routing prefixes, as it can be difficult to store such information within the hardware resources of a network. In order to address such issues, techniques are presented herein through which a clustering capability can be enabled for existing and/or newly deployed physical and/or virtual networking devices in order to form a virtual network service control plane that can facilitate scaling for the deployment of hybrid cloud services. As described in further detail herein, networking protocols can be utilized to provide intent and guidance regarding the replication capability of databases in distributed operating system infrastructure within a set of networking devices such that the cluster forms the virtual network service control plane

A Monte Carlo Study of Rainfall Sampling Effect on a Distributed Catchment Model

A Monte Carlo study of a physically based distributed-parameter hydrologic model is described. The catchment model simulates overland flow and streamflow, and it is based on the kinematic wave concept. Soil Conservation Service curves are used to model rainfall excess within the basin. The model was applied to the Ralston Creek watershed, a small (7.5 km2) rural catchment in eastern Iowa. Sensitivity of the model response with respect to rainfall-input spatial and temporal sampling density was investigated. The input data were generated by a space-time stochastic model of rainfall. The generated rainfall fields were sampled by the varied-density synthetic rain gauge networks. The basin response, based on 5-min increment input data from a network of high density with about 1 gauge per 0.1 km2, was assumed to be the “ground truth,” and other results were compared against it. Included in the study was also a simple lumped parameter model based on the unit hydrograph concept. Results were interpreted in terms of hydrograph characteristics such as peak magnitude, time-to-peak, and total runoff volume. The results indicate higher sensitivity of basin response with respect to the temporal resolution than to the spatial resolution of the rainfall data. Also, the frequency analysis of the flood peaks shows severe underestimation by the lumped model. This may have implications for the design of hydraulic structures